home entertainment 2007

Diablo’s workmanship and exquisite
finish—and its price—you need to see it
close up and run your hands across the
stunning woodwork. Photos just don’t
do it justice. With its leather-clad front
and rear panels, its cravat-shaped
mid/tweeter grille cover (which I left
off for my auditioning), and its angled
front baffle, the Diablo shares some of
its appearance with speakers from
other brands. But while it lacks the
visual allure of, say, the Sonus Faber
Stradivari Homage, and some other
dramatically sculpted speakers, not
everyone, especially of the wifely variety—I’m
a realist, not a sexist—is looking
to make a loudspeaker fashion
statement in the living room. The Dia-
measurements, continued
concern is the high-Q peak seen at 480Hz in the ports’
response, coincidentally the frequency of the panel vibrational
resonance seen in fig.2. This might be high enough
in level to lead to coloration, though working against its
audibility will be the fact that the ports face away from the
listener. I was bothered by a slight “cupped hands” coloration
in the midrange when I auditioned the Diablos in
Mikey’s room. Perhaps I was hearing this port behavior.
The woofers (fig.3, blue trace) cross over to the
midrange unit at around 300Hz, and are well behaved
above their passband, rolling off with what appears to be a
12dB/octave slope. The Diablo extends quite low in frequency:
–6dB at 30Hz in this graph (the slight boost
between 45 and 400Hz is probably due to the nearfield
measurement technique). The midrange rolls in with a
shallow slope and has a shallow suckout in its farfield output
around 1200Hz. The overall response is otherwise
smooth and even through the bass and midrange, up to
the crossover to the tweeter, where there is a sharp discontinuity
in the speaker’s output followed by a slightly
shelved-down high treble. As MF noted in his auditioning,
El Diablo’s “personality” is on the slightly mellow side,
which I also felt to be the case.
Michael mentions the danger of taking a relatively large-
Fig.4 Peak Consult El Diablo, lateral-response family at 50", normalized to
response on tweeter axis, from back to front: differences in response
90–5° off axis, reference response, differences in response 5–90° off
axis.
blo can blend in like the finely finished
piece of furniture that it is, and its size
and footprint would seem to make it
an ideal candidate for the city sophisticate’s
drawing room.
Setup
Positioning the Diablos was easy. They
sounded best in my room where
almost every other pair of speakers has:
where RPG’s computer program said
they would, based on the room’s
dimensions and the physics of wave
propagation. And I sat where I always
do: where the program tells me to,
about 11' from the front wall and 8'
from the speakers.
RPG’s program takes into account
the height, size, and location (front,
side, or rear) of a speaker’s woofer(s).
While variations in these factors will
affect the results to a small degree,
there’s been a remarkable consistency
of speaker positions throughout the
years I’ve used the program to review
speakers in this room. Almost all of
them, El Diablos included, end up
about 9' apart, a bit more than 2' from
the front wall, and toed-in, with the
corners of their rear baffles about 3'
from the sidewalls. The Diablos sounded
best with their tweeters firing
directly on axis.
Listening
The understated and meticulous sensi-
diameter midrange unit too high in frequency, mainly due
to the fact that it will “beam” where its diameter approaches
the wavelengths of the frequencies it is emitting. Yet
looking at Peak Consult’s plot of lateral dispersion (fig.4), it
can be seen that the Diablo’s output off axis is relatively
uniform below 3kHz. However, there is a distinct step in its
radiation pattern just above 3kHz, and it’s possible that
Fig.5 Peak Consult El Diablo, vertical-response family at 50", normalized to
response on tweeter axis, from back to front: differences in response
15–5° above axis, reference response, differences in response 5–10°
below axis.
Fig.6 Peak Consult El Diablo, spatially averaged, 1 ⁄6-octave response in MF’s
listening room.
92 www.Stereophile.com, May 2007